Running VMware VMs in Azure

Q. Can I run VMware VMs in Azure?

A. This is an interesting question and to answer, its important to take a step back and think about it really means. A VMware VM consists of essentially two things:

The VM configuration and VMDK files are only usable on a VMware ESX hypervisor. Azure uses Hyper-V for its hypervisor and Hyper-V cannot read a VMware VM configuration file nor a VMDK file. At the time of this writing, Hyper-V does not support nested virtualization - meaning you could not run ESX inside a Hyper-V VM. However most likely customers ask this question because they want to know if their VMware workloads can run in Azure. The short answer is "yes," but through a replication/migration process.

To run a VMware format VM in Azure, the configuration for the VM needs to be converted to a configuration in Azure, the VMDK needs to be converted to a VHD and the VMware Tools need to be removed. There are a number of solutions available to do perform this:

If the requirement is for DR to Azure from VMware, then Azure Site Recovery (ASR) can be used which also uses the Scout technology for the replication. It also supports falling back to on-premises VMware from Azure. More information on ASR can be found at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/site-recovery/.